Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel (24 page)

It is true that my full seventy-eight inches of You-ness was not too different from what I had been as a One. It was equally clear that Marie knew no military history, or perhaps history of any kind—including her own recent one.

I looked at her so that she curved in markedly—corners had their uses. I myself might not know as yet what I was
for
here, certainly not as steadily as the dear departed and revered. But I knew what I was against, and just as strongly as, a while back, had been counseled. I was against Marie-ness, and all hypothecation or extrapolation of the same. More intimately speaking—oh the advantages here—I was against Marie.

Yet, I had to get on. All I knew about my American destination was its name—Hobbs—and its purpose—that second dialogue which would complete my preparation for this world. Where I was to be quartered, and who my interlocutor, was still unknown to me. Unless I wanted to bumble out among the populace—which, in the way events were let run free here, might cause anything from fatality to inconvenience—Marie was my sole connect.

“Dear a One,” I said. “Do not think that this a One will ever cease to be grateful for the part that you a One have played in Our education.” Always talk to parvenus in the most formal language one possesses; your dignity will that way be preserved, and theirs—to their delight—created.

No reply. She would tend to be suspicious of my good will, not having much of it toward me. Ah, these psychological, the air here was simply ringing with them. Then I remembered a plainer fact, that she was still in the corner.

“Do come forward,” I said, which released her. “Spin anywhere. Feel free. Really, One would never know you had not been One of Us from the beginning.” Actually, her texture was awful, in fact visible. “One wishes particularly to thank you a One for the gift of that most useful of phrases for the expression of the celebratizzical and amazingular; in fact, might One not be right if One sometimes suspects it to be the most supremely useful phrase in all variation?” Ask for information; it flatters.

A tough customer not to be soothed, or perhaps a fearful one. For the newcomer, as I had begun to take note of in myself, floating clouds of paranoia lurk everywhere. And when I recalled what it was she did me the honor to suspect me of—“Good God!” I said, then recovered myself neatly. “You may perhaps still recall the phrase: good God.”

“Aeow. Aeow quite. As One recalls, rather dimmishly to be sure, that’s only the half of it.”

“Indeed,” I said, all new and just gushing from the crater—perhaps that was the tack. “One would indeed be grateful if—if Your One-ness would—would consider giving me the other half, in that case. One did rather think that, given the hyphenated state of affairs here, there must be also some other phrase, some antonym—”

“You’ll find it on one Wall, once One is off. One oneself would rather not—” Here Marie very subtly spun away from my vicinity, this time ducking the corner; no doubt about it their curving is very deft; or is it coy?
They?
“One must be getting off, or rather,
on.
Well, see You, One day-day. See You around-the-around.”

I’m afraid—I mean I’m proud to say—I lost control of myself; I was evolving beautifully. “But what about my Orders!” I even wailed it. “The hospitality here—every a One is always leaving. I’m always being left behind, left to myself, left, left, left! You’re all so swervous. I’ve never been so much a loner in my—I demand my orders!”

How could I have forgotten that a One must never be charged or addressed that directly, Our whole nature being ovoidal, not confrontal.
Our?

“You’ll find things here are not so out-in-the-oval as at home.” Her voice was already hypnoid with going; she was on the fade. Whatever would i do? i felt myself shrinking to the nothing-without-company that the i so often is here.

Luckily, she had a last twinge of her former hasty, botchy self. “You might find them in that little collection of objects she appears to have let drop. Over there on the floor, runt. You seem to be getting all blind behind.”

I was, was I? I. Immediately I felt reinvigorated. I wasn’t only being
left
behind. According to the familiar multiple here, I was acquiring behindness in other ways—in fact I must already have it. I had a behind. Which must mean I also had a befront. Scrutinizing me as best I could, so far I found none of the coveted lumps, buds, et cetera—but, yes, if rather patchily, the beginnings of opacity. Then, even that interesting new envelopment lost my attention, in favor of—there it was on the floor, behind behind-me. The little collection.

It seemed to rest there in an aura of its owner, its former owner. Indeed, formerness interfused it, perhaps to show me how that emotion could sometimes be located here. The very floor seemed to hold its small group discriminately, if not with positive leaning. They were few, these objects. They were: a one, a two, a three thin little books, and a one as thin but in size more to the folio, a glass-and-silver folding lorgnette whose function and form I knew from our own museum specimens, and two-three to several, slender U-shapes whose use I didn’t know—those made of bone having a few humps center-oval, those of slim wire or metal being a plain U. Twist together the ends of any of these latter and each would make quite a passable ellipse—there was much of the curve in her nature.

And a letter. Off to one side, not in her aura nor in its own, a blue letter.

“Some of her nasty ditty books, no doubt,” said Marie.

I turned, more slowly than I had ever yet turned in all my duration. How this mean little creature ever once had encompassed all your splendid variations still passed my understanding—it not yet having grasped the essence of variation, that she be one of them. Slower yet I turned, filled with such a belching against-ness that I feared the worst without exactly knowing what that would be—which is of course what the worst
is.
Certainly my feelings were becoming far too fining for one who as yet had no outlets. I tried good-godding but that pinhole was simply not up to my mountainous needs. I wanted to push Marie off the planet altogether, or better yet, misdirect her to some horrible elsewhere quite other than the one which had been mine.

Just then, in the wall which now looked at me, a jigzag of lights frantically signaled for my attention. It was now harder for me to read such large-scale script, once having mastered the small—one pays for every talent here in the coin of its opposite—but finally I deciphered the message, a single word only but what a big one! Tentatively, I pronounced it, whereupon the wall immediately flickered, in much more modest script:
Too Broad an “A,”
but then gave me the corrected phonetic—causing me to think that if my own comprattle-trap had been half as cooperative, my vowels would by now be perfection. Then I said the word. Then I
said
it. If all the violences here have such immediate modes of relief, people here must exist under a continual blessure. Turning to befront Marie, I delivered it in a voice summoned from the depths the word itself might have been conceived in. “DAMN!”

Was it always this effective? For she was gone. Of course, she had already been about to. There was no telling. Experience might show, though I was beginning to have doubts on my ability to sort out the typical here. “Damn
you!
” I said hopefully, but, the you of Marie already being somewhere in outer space—to less satisfaction. One wanted a general statement, broaching all gaps, and individuations. I considered. “God Damn,” I said. “In fact, a good God Damn.” There is certainly some value in being original.

Then, full of the energy which accomplishment always brings, I could turn, first to my grieving, then to the hunt for my instructions—this paperchase between honoring the bygone and pursuing the foregone being the standard procedure for any emigrant.

Grieving with you and us is almost cognate; after a while—for us almost a full day—the empty space closes over the one who has stepped out of line. It is said that you, improving on this from your point of view, often manage somehow to preserve that bit of space as a memorial—by incorporating it in yourselves. If so, you have more room in your crowded withinwards than we in all our vastness of vibration. And if so, you do it, I saw now, with the aid of those objects to which you give so much dangerous function—which accounts in part for your trusting tenderness toward them. You use them to hold yourselves down in rooms when you are in them, to hold you there even when you yourselves are gone. Dear foolish ones, dear rich ones, though you must know as well as we do that the inanimate can have no permanent allegiance, you will even give to it your individuation. And grieving may therefore quite honorably attach itself to the dear one’s objects, this being the responsibility which after all, if long after, you do take.

But I was a One—from an Order wherein the day which accomplished no more than yesterday was deemed the best one—though there were those who held that a day which managed to do less was of an even higher security. Solid beings though we were geometrically, we had taught ourselves a bas-relief serenity, domesticating our much larger section of the immense inane by drawing together into the sameful, while you could keep your little dot important only by creating such forests of particularity, such fluxes of intermediacy as might tease you into forgetting that, coming or going, you met only yourselves.

So, here it was on the floor, her little collection, these surrogates of herself which, to hear her tell it, were merely some of many others she might have left to stand in place of her. Looking round, I was surprised by the strays allowed to clutter, in such a mess of mass, what should be such a strict arena. In my own quarters here, no doubt in deference to our known habit of non-having, there had been nothing but the room-window surfaces, plus those training books which came under what we call objects-of-intent. But here in a place so holy that at home its very construction would itself follow the curve of the infinite ellipse or
elliptois,
here there was such a mixture—ah, it was always such a mixture here; why would I never learn that this
was
the mixture! In the windows there were pots of geranium, from one of whom had perhaps escaped that bright impudence, later reported over the intercom, which several dawns back had climbed up to peep into my own. Near it, a sec-looking bit of business surrounded an artistically hewn subconic marked ketchup, and above both this and window ledge there was now being allowed to intrude a ketchup-geranium sunset—as if a one of you were trying over and over to remember the simple property: red. Could you never learn a thing once and for all, here?

Would never I? I stared at the three thin-square books of similar shape and size for some moments of comfort before realizing why this had stolen over me; then things did sometimes go samefully here. All three had been let fall with their ambiguous faces up, so that, farsighted as I still was, I might read them without bending. Well then, as long as I didn’t need to bend, or rather, admit to myself the near-frightening condition I had got into—that I could. The three said respectively,
De la Grippe, Toujours de la Grippe,
and
Encore de la Grippe:
then they were not the same literally, though having all the same imprimatur of author and the same subject. They were about disease. On the ellipse, we knew about diseases, in the way of people who have never had them. I was not eager to have this one, or any. Had she dropped these books to warn me that, on Here I might—or even, must? For, you see, the life of unreason being so hard to understand to a practitioner of the opposite (how much easier when the case is the other way round!), it had not yet occurred to me that everything in a world I found so powerfully instructive might not have been placed here solely to instruct
me.
Though accident was known to me, I had not yet acquired the least sense of that much subtler division of it, the casual. An even boggier periphery, the purposeless, still provides amusement. As for throwing anything away, of course We cannot, and neither really can you—every throw anywhere is a toward.

So when I came to the silver-and-glass lorgnette, which couldn’t be looked through since it was folded, I decided that it must be there to puzzle me, and was performing this reproof well. For there was no doubt that up to now I had been incontinently knowing here, one of the many new colorations of your personality which were beginning to please me. Nevertheless, a compliment lay beside the lorgnette. The long-thin book entitled
was not only about Us, but also by a Harry. I was tempted to stop to read about ourselves as you saw us, but overcame it. So far, there had been no criticism of my educational pace. But grieving was indeed a slow process here, with as many byways for meditation as we provide for our picnics. Luckily, gravitation, that sticky stuff which keeps a body on the spot here, gives it also a constant prickly heat to get off it.

I regarded the U-shaped objects—more symbols? I had about given up the idea of pornography, on the surmise that, shames being so out-in-the-oval here, so had you. Just then, my computer came briefly to life again, perhaps stirred, in the presence of those rival walls of light, to show off its own circuitry.